I just moved from an HTC (crap Wildfire S!!!) to an iPhone 5. Been with Android for a couple years under memory restrictions, so I kinda went crazy with the iPhone app downloads the past week.

Anyhow, I thought maybe there's an app out there that could help me keep track of my field recording locations. I find I sometimes don't slate enough info and forget exactly what/where I recorded. My main problem is that I hate sitting in front of the computer editing; so the recordings could be months old.

So I went on a search for something that could help out with this. So far there's nothing EXACTLY made for what I need, but I DID find something useful. It's called map-a-pic. (they have an Android version too) It's designed for location scouting, but it seems I can use it for field recording as well.

It basically marks on a map where you are, lets you take pictures and notes, and stores it for retrieval within the app. I haven't taken it out yet, but I think it will work well.

I've emailed the developer and asked if he could include an audio recording feature within the app, which I think would be useful. (simultaneously record my slate into the app and my field recorder as a backup in case I get really screwed up) He said he would add it to his road map for future improvements.

Well, thought I would put that out there and see if anyone else finds it useful. And if you happen to know something that's better, please do let me know.

And full disclosure; I'm in no way connected to this app. I'm just a disorganized guy in Taiwan who likes to record stuff.

Sounds cool if you forget the extra details or want to see a visual with the recording. Soundminer lets you view a picture with your results so incorporating it with that would be neat. In the end, it might be easiest to just remember to slate better and with more details.

I like the idea of map-a-pic, it's pretty close to what I've been doing so far in that I just take a photo with the iPhone's built-in app as it stores GPS data and from the timestamp on the photo you can match it to your recordings.

It'd be great if we could also then just export everything to xml so you could write a parser that then moves it all directly into soundminer or even just an excel sheet.

Of course making it a habit to slate well is priceless and should come first, you can never have enough metadata though!

Thanks for pointing out map-a-pic, I'll give that a try and see what else is out there apart from my all-time fav: pen & paper.

+1 on this. The fastest way that I know of is just to voice slate everything for metadata tagging at a later point. It can be tedious, but if you're using Soundminer or similar software (Basehead, Audiofinder, etc) you can change the location information of any number of files simultaneously. As far as descriptions are concerned...well, you can do batch meta-tagging for broad passes of info, but you really would want to be as specific as possible for each individual file. Which means inputing all that info by hand. On each file.

AndreEngelhardt wrote:I like the idea of map-a-pic, it's pretty close to what I've been doing so far in that I just take a photo with the iPhone's built-in app as it stores GPS data and from the timestamp on the photo you can match it to your recordings.

It'd be great if we could also then just export everything to xml so you could write a parser that then moves it all directly into soundminer or even just an excel sheet.

Andre has the right idea. I usually carry one of my cameras around with me (either a Canon 7D or a Fuji X100s) to document as much of the recording process as possible so I can pick and choose which photos to use on which sounds individually. Also, Soundminer does natively support bringing in XML/Excel sheets and applying the data contained in them to whatever files you have selected/currently displayed.

Hello, I do not know mac-a-pic, but I use MotionX-GPS (http://gps.motionx.com/) on my iphone. This is a fairly similar app I think. I use it to create tracks of my hiking and my recording sessions. What I find very handy is the ability to export tracks in KML format, and import it into google maps or earth. Then it is easy to export data to Excel.